THE CHIPEWYANS, THEIR SPEECH AND WRITING
Sweeping generalisations are always misleading, therefore I offer some now, and later will correct them by specific instances.
These Chipewyans are dirty, shiftless, improvident, and absolutely honest. Of the last we saw daily instances in crossing the country. Valuables hung in trees, protected only from weather, birds, and beasts, but never a suggestion that they needed protection from mankind. They are kind and hospitable among themselves, but grasping in their dealings with white men, as already set forth. While they are shiftless and lazy, they also undertake the frightful toil of hunting and portaging. Although improvident, they have learned to dry a stock of meat and put up a scaffold of white fish for winter use. As a tribe they are mild and inoffensive, although they are the original stock from which the Apaches broke away some hundreds of years ago before settling in the south.
They have suffered greatly from diseases imported by white men, but not from whiskey. The Hudson's Bay Company has always refused to supply liquor to the natives. What little of the evil traffic there has been was the work of free-traders. But the Royal Mounted Police have most rigorously and effectually suppressed this. Nevertheless, Chief Trader Anderson tells me that the Mackenzie Valley tribes have fallen to less than half their numbers during the last century.
It is about ten, years since they made the treaty that surrendered their lands to the government. They have no reserves, but are free to hunt as their fathers did.
I found several of the older men lamenting the degeneracy of their people. "Our fathers were hunters and our mothers made good moccasins, but the young men are lazy loafers around the trading posts, and the women get money in bad ways to buy what they should make with their hands."
The Chipewyan dialects are peculiarly rasping, clicking, and guttural, especially when compared with Cree.
Every man and woman and most of the children among them smoke. They habitually appear with a pipe in their mouth and speak without removing it, so that the words gurgle out on each side of the pipe while a thin stream goes sizzling through the stem. This additional variant makes it hopeless to suggest on paper any approach to their peculiar speech.
The Jesuits tell me that it was more clicked and guttural fifty years ago, but that they are successfully weeding out many of the more unpleasant catarrhal sounds.
In noting down the names of animals, I was struck by the fact that the more familiar the animal the shorter its name. Thus the Beaver, Muskrat, Rabbit, and Marten, on which they live, are respectively Tsa, Dthen, Ka, and Tha. The less familiar (in a daily sense) Red Fox and Weasel are Nak-ee-they, Noon-dee-a, Tel-ky-lay; and the comparatively scarce Musk-ox and little Weasel, At-huh-le-jer-ray and Tel-ky-lay-azzy. All of which is clear and logical, for the name originally is a description, but the softer parts and sharp angles are worn down by the attrition of use—the more use they have for a word the shorter it is bound to get. In this connection it is significant that "to-day" is To-ho-chin-nay, and "to-morrow" Kom-pay.